


Wide New World

by Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)



Series: Death's Gifts [3]
Category: Highlander
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, GFY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 06:46:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11076210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/pseuds/Morgyn%20Leri
Summary: Kronos wakes to find himself alive once more, in a world that reminds him more of his youth than anything else has in centuries.





	1. Chapter 1

There is a sky over his head, a deep and vibrant blue that he has rarely seen anywhere but his dreams, with a few red-limned clouds scudding across it. Taking a breath - he hasn't been able to do that in months, with no body to call his own - he can smell wood smoke, damp earth, and the rich green of living plants. There's a faint hint of rot beneath, the sickly-sweet smell teasing at his nose for a moment before fading away.

He can hear the rush of wind over long grasses, unhindered by trees or tall buildings, and can feel it against his skin, a cool breath that cuts through the heavy damp of the air. Underneath it he can hear the faint gurgle of water over stone, and some of the crackle and pop of the fire he smelled earlier. All things he did not think to have again, his head lost to an irritating child steeped in a youthful morality.

Curling his fingers, Kronos can feel soft fur beneath him, fine strands catching against the dry skin of his hands. There's a hard surface beneath it, something keeping him off the ground itself and protecting the bedding from any ground moisture. Turning his hands over, he feels the tug of something tucked around him, and reaches up enough to brush his fingers against a woolen blanket, rough and heavy. Keeping him warm, though the air already promises it won't be needed for long.

The sky slowly lightens overhead, orange and gold painting the clouds as the sun lifts higher over the horizon. Its light is warm against his right side, and he knows he will have to look away soon if he's going to avoid it hitting his eyes.

When he does, he studies the camp laid out in front of him, and the man who is present in it. He's either not noticed Kronos waking, or he's ignoring him - and his instincts scream it is more the latter than the former. Why, when it is a foolish thing, is the question.

"Where am I?" His voice is rough, and Kronos isn't even certain it's loud enough to be heard until the man turns away from the fire to face him, a smile crossing his face.

"Awake at last! That will please your lady when she returns."

The man pushes to his feet, coming over and offering Kronos a hand to help him up. That he needs to steady Kronos once Kronos is on his feet is annoying, but tolerable for the moment.

"My lady?" Kronos has never called any woman that, and he frowns at the blond man's designation of anyone as such.

"Tiny, dangerous, beautiful." The man just grins at his scowl, and stays next to Kronos until they're at the fire, and Kronos can sit against one of the logs set around it. "Rebecca called her Asherah, though I don't know if it's the name you know her by."

"One of them." Kronos doesn't know how Alysse has won him free of the Highlander or given him back his body, and he doesn't particularly care. "Where am I?"

"None of us are actually certain. Darius and Rebecca don't recognize the stars, nor did Asherah when she had the chance to see them last night. First clear night in a week."

"How many others are here?" Kronos counts five logs placed around the fire, but that doesn't mean there are only five people. He wants to know the true number of people actually exist in this place - some sort of afterlife, perhaps, a paradise he'd long since ceased to believe in. And how many of them are Immortals who have lost their heads.

"Seven, counting you. Five of us remember dying." The man glances at Kronos again. "Asherah said you were dead, too."

"I was." Kronos scowls a moment before he smooths his expression. It doesn't matter any more, unless the Highlander is among those who call this camp and this strange place a home. "Who are the others?"

"A bear of a man who called you brother, and hasn't shared his name with any of us, Rebecca who I've mentioned, Darius, and Sean." The man pauses, and smiles again. "And I am Hugh Fitzcairn."

Kronos is quiet a long moment, deciding which name he would share with these people. Alysse hasn't shared the name he had called her most often, the name he gave her when he had met her, never bothering to ask what name she had taken among the mortals she called her own. "I am Kronos."


	2. Chapter 2

Breathing in deeply, Alysse smiles as she tilts her face into the wind, the rich metallic smell of blood heavy in her nose, overlaying the mineral tang of a fresh-water spring and sweet green of spring grass fading toward summer. She has a moment to spare while her hands dry from washing them clean before she must shoulder her freshly-butchered kill to return to camp. A luxury of hunting with another, though her companion isn't the one she wants most at her side. Her wolf still slept when they left the camp before the dawn.

She opens her eyes when the warmth of the sunlight on her back is replaced by the cool of shadow, rolling onto the balls of her feet to push to her feet. A rolling ocean of vivid green-gold falls away in front of her, a narrow stream tumbling over outcrops of rocks down toward a gorge that cuts into the high steppe. It widens into a jungle-filled canyon beyond the horizon, where Silas has spoken of large cat-like predators who think nothing of stalking even him.

A world of wild spaces as wide as she could wish, with no one to hem her in with cities and roads and the demands of mortal civilization. She has no ship, and no sea, but even the desire to smell salt on the air and hear the roar of the waves doesn't chafe as it has in the past.

"Do you want to continue to hunt, little sister?" Silas had called her that from the moment he found her sprawled next to Kronos in a patch of soil scorched to glass, her small boat and the ocean that had cradled them vanished as if they'd never been. He called Kronos brother, and he'd been gentle in carrying his sleeping body - breathing, heart beat strong in her ears when she'd awoken first to this new place - back to a camp which had the air of a season-long settlement, and mostly unfamiliar Immortals.

"Not today." Alysse turns away from the plain long enough to reach down to pick up the carefully-bundled pack of butchered cuts, slipping the straps over her shoulders. The heavier one is quickly shouldered by Silas, leaving little behind save blood and matted grass. Their path winds trackless through the grasses, relying on their memories and the shifting light of the sun over their heads to lead them home.

The sun is setting by the time they return to camp, Fitzcairn coming to take Alysse's pack while Silas drops his next to the fire.

She looks past him out of habit, gaze falling on the low bed where Kronos had slept when Silas asked her to hunt with him. It is empty, and for a moment, panic courses through her, and Alysse draws in a deep breath to shout at Fitzcairn. Only to let it out in a wordless shriek when arms wrap around her waist, someone stepping up to press against her back.

"Brother!"

Silas's happy call is reassuring, and Alysse twists around in Kronos's arms, lunging up to press a hungry kiss to his lips, biting at his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. She slides her hand up into his hair, and brushes her thumb over his ear before gripping it between thumbnail and finger.

Kronos tightens his arms around her, a low growl escaping him that's mixed irritation and amusement. Pulling back, and looking down to meet her gaze readily. "Let go."

"No." Alysse pinches his ear a little tighter before loosening her grip. "Don't startle me like that."

Chuckling, Kronos loosens his arms, resting one hand on her hip while he reaches up to pet the short strands of her hair. "When did you do this?"

"When I had a chance to mourn." Alysse lets go of his ear, leaning in to rest her head against his chest, Kronos's heartbeat a comforting thump under her ear. "Better to die on mother's waves than live all the lifetimes of the world alone. She gave you back to me instead."

"How long ago?" Kronos slides the hand on her hip to the small of her back, holding her against him, though it feels as if there's less strength in his grip than the last time he'd held her, before he'd died.

"I don't know. It's been a week since I woke here, though the days seem longer than they had become with civilization always hemming us closer and closer in." If that's the change in wherever they are, or just her imagination, she doesn't care. They're far from those constraints and all that would enforce them. "I was beginning to worry you wouldn't wake."

Kronos curls his hand around the back of her neck, pulling her up to kiss her again, silent promise that he wasn't going to abandon her so easily, not after he'd been stolen from her once.


	3. Chapter 3

The next day brings the return of the other Immortals which Fitzcairn had mentioned, one familiar to Kronos as his Silas, though he had become someone far different in the last centuries of their lives.

"It is good to see you awake, Aurelius." Darius watches Kronos with a wary expression as he shrugs off his pack to set it next to the ones the woman - greeted as Xanthia by Alysse, and as Rebecca by Fitzcairn - and the other man, who must be Sean, had shed.

"It is good to be alive." Kronos shrugs, adding another piece of wood to the embers to keep the fire from dying and needing kindled once more. "And to see you once more."

He had heard of Darius's death, the loss of his Quickening because it was mortals who killed him - had to be mortals, for none of them would have killed on Holy Ground. If he had known who to hunt, he would have torn the fools who had killed Darius to pieces, and perhaps been satisfied for a time.

A small smile curls the corner of Darius's mouth as he settles across the fire, pulling the packs closer to him. "You seem more settled in your own skin than the last time I saw you." He pulls neat bundles of greenery out of the pack, some which look vaguely familiar, some which look fascinatingly strange - and not all of which are entirely green.

Kronos snorts, leaning back against the section of log which has become his seat. "I was dead."

It is good to be alive again, and to be beyond the reach of anything any mortal might do. The stars last night had been strange indeed, even to his eyes, no familiar patterns in them at all.

That the moon which shone a broad crescent had held nothing familiar, either, and was larger than he'd ever seen, spoke even more of them being well beyond the reach of mortals, wherever they are.

"As have we all been." Darius passes him one of the bundles of stranger greenery. "Strip the scales from that."

It's a task of a sort which had been left to the women when Kronos had thought himself mortal, and to slaves when the Horsemen had rode. That he'd had to do for himself between one and the other, and after he'd crawled out of the well Methos had left him in. He unties the string binding the mass of neatly aligned stems, and begins to do as Darius had instructed.

Better than being idle, when there are only the seven of them.

"All of us?" He glances to where Alysse is helping to separate other bundles into smaller ones, sitting companionably with Rebecca, the two women leaning close to each other to talk without being overheard.

Darius looks over to follow his gaze, and the small smile makes a brief return. "Even she, though she has not spoken of how or when. I thought it might have been soon after you had met your end, as you arrived together."

Kronos doubts it had occurred as closely as Darius believes, but he had spent the time dead and crammed into the back of an irritating child's head, with no sense of the passage of time. No way to know how long he'd been trapped there before waking here.

"She wasn't there." Kronos doesn't want to speak of his death, the pain of Methos's betrayal welling up unexpectedly, and making him want to destroy things. To have his once-brother in front of him so he could kill him over and over again. "She was safe."

"Even the best of us are never entirely safe." Darius reaches for a stack of baskets - there are several scattered about the camp - and hands one to Kronos before settling one in his own lap.

Kronos chuckles, though the sound is more bitter than he intended. The best, indeed. Seven of the oldest and best of them, and most of them slain by children or worse. He envies Silas his death at Methos's hands, and wonders how Alysse had lost her head. There are few of the younger Immortals who fight well where she prefers to live.

"There are more of us dead than those of us here. How is it we are chosen?" Kronos glances over at Darius as he begins to snap the scales off the underlying branch, something that feels spongy, with a slick surface, under his fingers. The smell that rises is refreshingly sharp, with a metallic tang that coats the back of his throat when he breathes in.

Darius shrugs. "None of us know. Although there are some I am content never to see here."

Kronos tilts his head to acknowledge the point - there are many he'd as soon not encounter again, both those he's killed and those he hasn't. Even though he'd relish the chance to kill Methos himself, he will be glad never to see his erstwhile brother here. Better that he lives than he is at Kronos's mercy.


End file.
